Pascal had his pit which followed him about.Alas, all is abyss – action, desire, dream,words! and on my skin whose hair stands on end,time after time, fear passes like a wind.

High, low, all round nothing but depth and desert,silence, space, horrible and hypnotising;in the depth of my nights God with artist’s handsdraws a nightmare teeming without respite.

I fear sleep as I do a vast abyssbrimful of vague horror leading who knows where.From every window I see mere infinfity.

And my mind, ripped by eternal vertigoenvies the insensibility of nothing.Can we escape Numbers and Beings?

VISITING HOUR

Beyond the institution's buckled panewhere men and women swear and swear again,the magpies build; careless in the cold,they sidle along branches and unfoldtheir green sheen like an unsheathed blade; no fearloosens their grip on what they hold most dear.

Two marble figures on the fireplace;spindle and woollen comb in hand, they facea nymph recumbent by a sacred gladeor comatose perhaps: her only shadecomes from her wings askew, her legs are wrappedround each other in a drowning grip.

So this is where I've come to: Brigid's Daylistening to cars like breakers in a bay,clawing life as on a riverbank,too old, too dry, too much time to think.Visiting hour is over, cars will pullaway, half-lit, and leave us to the dull

struggle that is the season's fight with dusk,ours with ourselves - the pain, the shame, the riskof resolution and its falling off.And now the night is looming like a cliff,the eyes pierce one last time, but nothing's seenbut flitting black and white - no hint of sheen.

SNOW

Snow subsides to hail, then puddled mush.Smokers peer outside then brave the lashof February wind: the healing stingof nicotine a harbinger of spring.

My mind keeps racing to a month from nowa step into a world long disavowed,a fear of woodland floors, of sudden bells.I sleep to dreams of flowers and poisoned wells,

then wake to darkness, breakfast and distraction,a cosy world of banter and addiction.I wonder how the land lies miles away,how white or grey the fields, how harsh the day.

From out of nowhere a strange image rears:barelegged, teenage Camus in Algierspicturing his death among the pillars,a happy death of mischance, not of valour,

his head thrown back, sight broken by the sun,the seed long planted, the ascent begunas happened with us all one far-off timeof early morning air, the tang of rime,

a time of first denial we admitlooking out at snowdrops and cat's shit,a garden perfect, manicured, imprisoning,pattern of a thousand fractured evenings.

O to be a boy again and startwith what I know now; body, mind and heartin perfect balance, wisdom preordained,each error learned from, the soul but lightly stained.

Still we must have our dreams, our happy death,something to think on as we stir our brothand try to banish visions of relapsestuck in a warp where every little helps.

HAIL

Hail, if you look long enough, becomes a sheet.Life, on the other hand, is never neat.

MEDITATION TIME

Meditation time, the stomach full;cars like insects thread along a paththat leads nowhere; clouds gather, midday spillsinto an hour that's calm, or fraught, or both.

Thinking of streets I'll never walk again,alleys opening on a prospect of the west,looking at that hill, guessing beyond,I'm drawn to a picture of a child at rest,

perfectly content: what happened him,what age was he when beauty seized his mindand fractured it along a faultline rimof what he dreamed and how he was confined?

NO BELL

No bell was rung. This evening stretcheslike a grave; long-buried sounds -a clapped-out fridge, hot water retchingin ancient pipes. Outside, the groundsare blanketed, the cats are goneacross the wall, into a zonemore to their liking. From yard to frequentyard, sensors light in sequence.The view upstairs will be of snow,the suburbs in their orange glow.

Five days in and still the jitters,the world out there intact yet tattered,I count the hours by increment,debate the nature of resentment,imagine an old Impressionistsketching outbuildings in a mistor Van Gogh in Arles confinedin the asylum of his mind,the eggyolks of his starry skyforgotten songbirds blown away.

I leaf through books I know by sightthe pain-body, the inner lightand wonder at the kind of painthat leads the sufferer to such gain.While others write life historiesI wonder if I've tried to pleasetoo much, the line of least resistancea brighter apple than persistence;why happiness is bought too dear.What is it that has brought me here?

The books call resentment old anger;I see it as kind of hunger - the cancerous kind - but still a needthe addict like a lover feedsuntil there's no pick left uponthat stubborn, brittle skeletonand in the end what profits itto win the patch on which we sitand watch the wreckage on the shoreof twenty ruined years or more?

Instead tonight we talk of races,illicit vodka, hiding places,never of life and death: it's therebut like the sudden change of airthat chills far-off; an expected hourthat always catches unawares.The wind has shifted, rain has come,an unrelieving rain that drumsof all that's begged, that's stolen, borrowed,the harsh tattoo of each tomorrow.

HOME

Being my home now, my idea of home,I check in, check that everything's in order,flick through photos of an ageing Janet Frame'Dear J, where is the heart and the river?'

Heart is with the body, firm as life,river, just beyond where the eye stops seeing;the mind an ever-vagrant losing, halfwhat it is, half someone else's being;

all it knows of itself it finds in snatcheslike a low guitar played in a distant roomor silver glimpsed beneath a swirling surfaceor a half-remembered nursery rhyme of home.

MORNING

It is morning and I stand in the yardwhere we waited too long for the moon.It has so small a space to play uponas we stood round wondering what we'd heard

over the wall - a cry of some kind,animal or bird, no one could be sure.It was cut short by the thud of a door.I knew it was a disconnected mind,

lifted with a wrench from the soul's socket.The moment's silence after it went mutewas as surrounding a death; stilled, tightas a curled hand in an anxious pocket.

Now, the calm of traffic freely moving,grit in a stream, its thousand jittery stories.My mind is fixed on a sudden door,the dark within; what passes for loving.

SUNDAY

There are no snowdrops here; that bed, unpierced,is a circle of resistance. Evening leadsinto its lengthening self. So Sunday diesand I descend into a Stygian placewhere nothing matters but the wait. No booksprepare you for that hour before a glasslooking at a stranger, his eyes readinga vacancy in yours; there's something fiercein that distracted, fretful gaze, a wondering -

how did this other get here? It will pass:with luck the dark will swallow itself upand leave me with the delusion of no change,the younger man who once looked out with hope.How long ago was that: how many dankand fruitless nights have parted to admitthis shambling life, dishonesty writ large,character left rotting where it sank?Today is Sunday. No lie changes it.

After tea, the clotting smell of smokealong old stairwells. Clear air stings the eyeswhile shadows break the spotlight on the path.We spend the night rifling old memoriesfor one that might bring comfort, one to takeand wind around our sleeplessness. But noneoblige; as though they've burrowed underneaththe years' resentments, morning's cowardice,and sleep there, whole and undisturbed, while this

ironic spring, this slow, unfolding deathof what we thought too precious to let gogathers apace; it leaves a weight like stonewhere should have been a sob; and though we knowit happens for the best, the best is gone.

THE FOURTH WEEKEND

Someone is retching in the shower next door,a woman, youngish by the sound of it.The fourth weekend begins, the end in sightand I have dredged up memories from where

they had been buried far beyond the prospectof ever being seen. Last night I thankedmyself for having nerve enough to sinkas deep as needed, from one layer to the next

and having reached, I sensed I felt, I tasted - polished teak, the loaf's heart - lingering hintsof what surrounded, overwhelmed; what lengthsthe mind will go to bury childhood's waste.

Being there, being that child again,full of wonder but with shredded nerves,the sort of boy who never felt by halves,whose body crouched anticipating pain

and never straightened whether pain came or not,whose world was all escape and fear of capture:where does he wander now; what sort of rupturekept us apart? What part of me forgot?

And how did that youngster see himself at fifty?It must have been a stepping off the world,so far away it seemed at ten years old,two generations off and nothing left

but age and death: no love, no rage, no passion,nothing but a sense of having survivedand being at rest, as old men with their livesalmost complete must be - an intuition

of what the man now wishes for - in spiteof every gift that couldn't be foreseenforty years before: all that has beenand gone, and must be mourned in changing light.

Two weeks from now I'll step into a worldthat won't know how it's changed; each mundane stepthat has to be pre-planned for fear of tripping,the daily routine with no prop to hold.

I see a figure distant by a road,indecisive, unsure if to crossbrings death or redemption, liberty or loss.There is no track where someone else has led

that ends in certainty; no doubling backwill bring you where you were. Some giddy daybefore much longer, I must find a waywithout a crutch for comfort; without luck.

THE LAST

The last brandy drunk, the last drop licked,the beaker dried and put away for good,morning haze is a memory now. Good food,rest, and the mind-balm of peculiar boredomhave made no difference, as I try to steala look back to the light before the blurand all I find is loss, a never-been.It seems I spun more quickly than I thought.

Gaps have opened up in front, behind,as if gouged by a sheet of dying ice.Retreating pins and needles prick my brain;sight is a peering into light so painfulit hammers like a hangover: too bright,that first reflection's truth. Pull the blinds tight,close the lids and let the truth grow still,the lungs expel the devil in the will.

I wonder at the outside; what's been lost,letters waited on like clutched-at straws;how far I am from where I first called home,how lost forever what I once thought love,scattered like bone from bullet, sheered like flint.Lift your mind from harm already done,heal yourself: the slogans of the cured,though no one is: I breathe them like an ohmm

that keeps the world at bay, words without thought -as if thought were a finger in the dam.Destruction moves apace though out of sight.No meditation gives the lie to that.It seems each day's a step from wreck to wreck,each morning prayer a run against the rockof each mistake that made me what I am:in need of absolution - but from whom?

COMPOSURE(Baudelaire, Recueillement)

Wait patiently, my sorrow, and be still.You longed for evening; here it comes, it falls,its darkling air enveloping the city.To some men it brings peace; to others, worry.

While the common herd of mortals, lashed by pleasure - Pleasure, that remorseless torturer -store up their own remorse in slavish orgies,Sorrow, give me your hand along this pathway.

Dead years in faded robes are leaning, bentover heaven's balcony, and from the depthsrises the smiling fountain of regret;

the sleepy sun dies underneath an archand like a long veil from the Orient -listen, my love, to gentle night's approach.

First weekend out, I crave the kindof peace I had: not that of mindbut from a world that doesn’t careabout the crap that brought me there

among the shock of scrambled lives,the air sharp with unspoken want,communal meals, the ancient knivesblunt as jaded wit: what haunts

already is the sense of lossspread like a weed: the harbour wall’smoss campion and the House’s trellisedrose no linger beautiful.

Nothing prevails. Each brash invaderfoundered here: and how could wedo otherwise, our life a raidthat shatters on a destiny

unrecognised until too late.They say we always have a choice.Some of us, when we found our voice,chose the iron ease of fate.

Have I been led here? Many timesI’ve conjured my retiring years’calm Sundays gazing at the gulls’ fierceswoop, discarded trawler lines,

but now I realise the sealooks best in verse. Too much was lost.Ford Escorts with swan-off exhaustswhine Sunday’s new reality;

one does a handbrake on the quay.I wish he’d topple in the sea.But no, that’s last year’s twisted thought,I try forgiveness – just a jot,

and realise just how much workI’ve yet to do, how long and darkthe road ahead, each day the same.The ferry waits. Some other time.

THE DANCER

Birds skitter along the branches of fruit treesbare of blossom under the kiss of the sea,and I who have stopped counting summersbegin to think of a beginning, overcomeby wonder at the freedom of a first step,the gradual, widening gap between cup and lip.

I recall a girl dancing that first day, a strangerthen; the way she pushed back her fringeas she moved, it seemed, through several inner worlds.Something about her shimmered: tight as a pearlone instant, the next open as a full sail,eyes closed, fingers running along the music’s Braille.

Then therapy, the soul opened like a tin canbut clumsily, so that dregs were left to standand fester, would fester still but for the touchof inadvertent healing; one day someone reachedacross and said some words, inconsequentialand forgotten now, but triggering a kind of miracle.

And the walks in the garden: it must be in blossom nowwhere that giant branch lay, lopped off by a ton of snow.I had promised myself to walk it again in summer,one of those many made which no longer matterin light of the one great kept so far: today, today.The tide goes out, comes in. As for us, we’ll see.

OUT OF THE RIVER

I have seen you coming outof a river at dawnwashed by that peculiar lightwhen mist starts to burnoff the tops of the reed beds.You carry so lightly all the harmthe world has done to others.Slowly you extend your armsin greeting; your tilted head,quizzical, reminds me of our fathers

when they were younger than we arenow – than I am, rather.You walk through morning with no castof age on your countenance,as if everything could be as it oncepromised, when what we mostdesired could be fulfilledsimply by our standing still:we would ride the world like braves.I visited your tidied grave

last week, as if that would serveto salve somehow the different shamesI’ve gathered since you left;as if it were in your giftto bury what I cannot bring myself to name,forgetting that what I bury stays alive.It was, as of old, the coward’s way,this fear of facing what I’ve disinterred.Better to leave it undisturbed,like you imagined on the verge of day

where you will never assume the voiceof conscience, nor the blunt factof your bones grip like a vice.I went there looking for forgivenessknowing my presence was an act:the damage I’ve inflicted is the businessof the living, not the dead.Go back silently into the river, restin what peace exists for you; I’ll visitthe mausoleum of my teeming head.

KNOCKLYON

On the first good morning of the yearstout men, unused to rolled-up sleeves at nine,are helping wives guide trolleys to the car.They can’t seem to believe they’ve come this far,they carry the Irish fear: too sudden-finea day will set an old alarm in gear.

Too hot for a fry, the small café sits emptybut for a table set with fruit and coffee.I sit in what’s become my usual chair,the side wall an enormous Perspex screen.Smoke filters through an automatic door;the smell of roasting fowl and early wine.

A morning such as this you yearn: for Paris,its pavements newly-swept, its screeching cars,the Eiffel Tower spectral in the distance;for all the food you’ll never get to taste,the countless opportunities laid waste.The mind can buckle under such awareness

and lose the fleeting hour, the captured joy;the full night’s sleep, the appetite restored,the taste of that first, additive-filled fryafter a long sickness; being here.Birdsong at evening always newly-heard,the still-surprise of waking without fear.

And you remember unforgiven wakenings,the swaying room, that wishing to be deadwithout the drag of dying; what a bleak,what threadbare life would be let slip away.Those poisoned limbs, that fragile, battered headmight lie back one last time as when a boy.

Too clear a recollection makes me weak,but when it passes, as it will, the lightis kind, the weakness always worth the fight.These moments will one day become a rarity,these teeming pains of which I’ve yet to speak,the churning gut, the stab of clarity.

HOTEL STEPS

I stand beside the hotel stepsand gaze at bars and gambling joints,their popped-out bulbs and peeling paint, a vomit-slick where someone slipped;shop-fronts I never knew were therein such closed ranks, linked wall to wall.A smoker in a doorway bawlshis lingua franca of despair.

And suddenly what strikes me mostAbout this is its timelessness:that staggerer in his distressin search of a familiar masta century back: and I look onafraid to wander out or back,adventurous but firmly stuck,a coward as I would be then.

Seized by a longing for the sea,to watch the geese wheel in to land, the shingle’s grey and greyer band,a world that turned its back on methose derelict years, I rub my handas if my wish had layered itwith minuscule Atlantic grit.A drunken mind would understand,

chafed by a dirt that isn’t there,the sin of old forgotten nights,bilious hours of fear and spite,an aftertaste, polluting, sour;but now a quiet settles in.Sometimes the mind can go no further.A long look from a crumbling corner,the street gone dead, the last bulb blown.

BIRDSONG(for A.)

Stirring to birdsong in darkI remember those February mornings,their traffic and magpie chatter,the half-choke, half-snore of a neighbour.The hour too late for turning;a grey settling over the park.

Then the reading-room's afternoon glare,and you bent over your letters,your hand's fluid ease on the page,the fat book of stamps for sharing;how often your generous natureshortened what seemed like an age.

You walked with the truth beyond fault,embraced every feeling but pity;your presence felt after you'd gonewhen I looked out, my time nearly done,at the breadth of an afterstorm citygleaming like river-washed silt.

And I picture you by the seayour house nearly finished by now,sun-slant on generous uplandsand all, I trust, well in hand,life as you hoped it would be -day long and everything new.

LETTING GO

There is no dream these nights to trouble meuntil I've lain ten minutes half-awake,put names to faces that I couldn't see,an accent from the weeks I thought I'd break;then sleep, this time a comfortable pit,the limbs at ease, the mind no longer split.

I rise and dress where once my parents dressed;the floor, although, is warm under my feet.My life has led me beyond being depressedinto a place of shadows' friendly heat.The walls are hung with pictures of the dead.I watch my fingers as I slice my bread.

Sometimes I fidget to the rhythm of slogans:Keep it simple. Don't forget the hell.I hoard my memories as if they were tokensof something greater, purer. Truth to tell -but that's a lock no fine pin can unpick,the final redoubt no remorse has cracked.

Instead I point the finger at another,a weakling habit I can't seem to shake.There is a fear that doesn't cut but smothers,a love that ends in nothing, sullen, bleak:where are those summer hours on hallowed ground?No doubt enjoyed by others this time round.

I rest in silence and ignore the clock,its endless telling there's no going back,and think instead of full and ebbing tide,clutching the prospect others might decideto chuck the jetsam of their life ashore.I cross my fingers. I can do no more:

we're never sure who wants or doesn't want us,nor do we get to choose the ghost that haunts us.And is it worth the struggle to believe,to wind up for another day's reprieve?Nearing the age at which my uncles died,I sit down with myself and can't decide;

I have to live this steady settling down,check the morning mirror for clear eyes;internal exile in some crumbling towna small voice tells me I should recognise,a dreary place whose name no traveller mentions,its backstreets huddled round a guilty conscience.

I give this fit an hour. it's bound to pass;and in its place some long-dead tenderness,memory or figment, a rediscovered spring,flows through me like the first bars of a song,its melody the only gift worth having,to know myself still capable of giving.

THE YARD

A white yard with a single potted flower,its craning head a sundial;I could be happy hidden from encroachingwildness on abandoned lanes.A cat basks on a corner of the wallas I wait for a midday glareto sting the eye to sense. My mind is wiredto houses thrown like bones on a far hillby twenty centuries of bloodand expiation: toothless, wrinkled menstare, steadfast as gulls,onto an unchanging sea whose griphas never been explainedexcept as womb, part nurturer, part monster.

I sailed to sleep one distant childish night,our house a boat on the foothillof some unmeasured wave; and with sleep’s driftit turned into a vast protecting whorl.I thought for years story could do the same:warm sunset months, blood washed from the floor,woman’s fingers welcoming as strawto worn, heroic limbs.Yet under all, music hid the crackof snapped bone, the sickshock of hull on coral; treacherous light,deceiving song, myth and music one,a clothing bound to tatter in a storm.The words oxen of the sun

transported me: I would have betterspent my time studying accounts; it’s where,like Odysseus, we all end up, whetherwe like or not, old men computing loss.It there a tale, however life-affirming,or carrying the tiniest germof hope, that did not beginin the gut of some sour, disappointed man?Blind Homer, relishing the cleftof sword from skull to sternum,had Hermes interpose because he must;I backed the side Zeus said would bleed the least,held faith with Hector cooling in his dust.And thus I kept my loser’s prejudice.

These walls will never redden from the west.An upstairs room looks out onto the lighthouseof a far window when the angle’s right:summer’s promise and leavetaking, losthours, sureties that stalledat almost. So I begin againwhere song has failed and all we have to tellbetrays our lack of what we wish we had.Darkness beckons, and something beyondthe lure of legends haphazardly heard;I’ll drift until I come to, stoodat an entrance to some Underworld,facing which way – the dark, the dust?I smell both when I step into the yard.

WARMTH

Warmth is seeping back, brick by brick it seems,into a dead space opened by a newer, different loss;morning lightens each room haunted by the scentof her last leaving. The hospital was waiting,room, corridor, lift, the trestle’s late-night shudder;we who were left walked back into the utter shockof the known forever altered, each settled object false,tapes never to be played, captured moments boxedlike spirits in a tree: just so, the house, still grudgingas if in silent judgement on what’s brought me hereto animate, to wipe, to balk at whitening ashes.Afraid of the dark when here was full of noise and laughter,I move now among the silences I’ve made of my life,settled where nothing fits, at home belonging nowhere.

SEPTEMBER

Morning has returned: quietly, as it doesthese days. A crow tracksan off-white van, its ladder half-secured,along the river's lead and silver.It becomes that much easier to rememberthis is how it always was, this senseof being stuck, of dreams as baggage. Newcomersare wearing our kind of clothes,they have succumbed to our idea of summer,though one woman, the fabric of her blouse too delicate,hugs herself: it can't be autumn yet.

The year creeps toward anniversaries,calls us to live in our peculiar momentfar from that Europe we thought we knew:it's there still, but only youseem to have the knack of gathering itto yourself: for me, it's as if nightcried out for candlesto blacken the pitch beyond. Rilke,Milosz, what they shaped burnt off like mistin a garden that never fully brightens;scavengers chase each other through the undergrowth.There will be no miracle of laurels.

In the garage forecourt a dull mothis hoarding the last warmth of brick.The sun will soon be in our eyesas we drive to work; then we'll setout in time to see it rise,the sky tight and livid, streakedwith a weak and angry rose,a long smudge where an early plane has wept.

BLUE BAR

Water in green expensive glass,light without a mote of dust:I watch as wave by wave, the pastyear's filth is washed away; the shorebeyond is farther than I thought,the bay is full of what I missedlast time. But here, in the Blue Bar,it feels like a departure lounge;nothing matters but the wait,the sense of being at the edgeyet calm, ready to be borne.Among the streets, the sleeping mill,its blades forever set to turn.Outside, no children stoop for shells.

FLORENCE

As the fire dies we dream of summer,wrap it round us as our life unfolds.Over time I've edged into a corner,a sinew in my side forever cold,and pass an hour in thoughts of what might bewithout the burden of philosophy.

And when I stand up, stiff and out of sorts,it's always with a sharp bewildermentat how the world has shrunk, how mild and shortthe summers are, how feeble our intentwhen wind veers north and rain invades old joints.I try to hide from damp and peeling paint

much as my life has been such vain evasion;my Horace has been boxed up and replacedby a row of barely looked-at meditations;still they look good, a new and shiny faceto the passer-by who glances in the windowon a rare day when the parlour's not in shadow.

A tedious business this, of new beginnings,especially when the hour grows late and heatis at a premium; sinned against in sinning,self-injurious, singing with a bleatof pity in the throat - you chalk it upto a shitty day, the kind that made you sup,

the kind you had to laugh at out of fearat what might follow. But those days are gone,the end of them at any rate: the tearthat falls is salt and water now; no ginor cider drop pollutes the purityof pain, the ego's steel integrity.

It's almost over now, day, dream, ambition;I've left them with a strange, exhausted joy.All that remains is to set foot in Florence,to feast the senses on what fires that boyI barely recognise: his memorydeserves at least a sunset among beauty.

THE WELL

When the long night is over: triumph, riot, rack,and you wake dreaming of Europe, its spires, its darkwaters, the calm you reach for is at the end of a longlane, its corners dark beyond the reach of song

as you are from the reach of cities. A weekenddeclines into the old necessities; slowly your bloodsettles, and another piece is fitted into the fractureof remembering, the never-answered question of your nature.

I would have you at an old well, bent, scoopingout mud, laying it carefully to one side, weepingfor its tiny, displaced lives, yet fascinated by that slowclarity as silt finds its level and a shape you know

to be yourself looks back at you. That cold in your marrow,its ache solely physical, is a promise to redeem the hollowyears; it roots you in an instant which is time’s essence. You straighten, pores shocked as from a shot of lime.

STARS

I look up at the moon for what seems the hundredth yearfrom the old backyard; same curiosity, same fearI felt at seven, or when I read that tale of Deathcoming to sit on the Chinese Emperor’s chestand the scent of jasmine beckoning at a window.The year, unmourned, is passing, and somehowI have arrived here and am back in the mindof a child: my numbed toes are growing into the ground.

This space is too confined to let me see the skywheel; but stock-standing, I can still dizzymyself with my smallness, like grit or a seed,with the purity of living in a state of need,a zinc bath long and deep enough to swim,the stars falling when we turn our back on them.

NOCTURNE

I peer down at a desolate streetits threatened snow a sullen sleet.I've left a tap discreetly runningfor fear a knife-cold, ruinous morningwould chill into the gut or deeper.Barely beneath the skin of sleep

my mind will dart, a restless yolkpropelled by fear of what might break,the memory of a year ago,the crushing weight of what I knowand what it cost, for me, for others.I right a picture of my father

and mourn what music died with him,his life's achieved, self-ordered rhythm,the lives he touched like music scattered,its notes remembered when it mattered.I step along the unlit landing,its chill my only understanding.

Later, warmed without, within,I cup my coffee and beginreliving the long descent,the nether world, the never-meant;wine and words' coincidence,futilities that all made sense.

Does wisdom skip a generation;are other genetic dispositionsswimming still, unknown, unhatched,dull as an incipient itch,a sullen Heraclitean ether?Is age a withering into tinder?

I've been advised to deal with deathby living within each passing breath - a crazy take on Wittgenstein -inhabiting the space betweenone inhalation and the next;no joys to lose, no lives to wreck:

it works so far - from time to time.I stir the fire. A spark-shower climbs,is gone. There is no sense of passingbeyond the news of snow-clouds massingtoo far away to hurt or worry.Dawn with its storm will break. No hurry.

BEVERLY DOWNS

That first morning, the shock of children's voicesimpossibly far away, carried as if across a meadow.I had forgotten schoolyards, shopping centres, choice,that there was a solid life around the shadowcast about me, the shadow I'd become,or such a thing as time decreed by somethingneutral as a clock or the rhythm of an urban day.Banked against the wall, houses, mute, their backs turnedas if in judgement. Waiting, I only knew the greyof snow to come, the chill of being stranded, notwhat was possible, a gift, or needing to be earned.A year on, and that lost figure is a vacuumwaiting to envelop me if ever I forgetthat the brightest uplands are on the very rimof disaster. For now, it is enough to have seen the wallfrom the placid, ordered slope of Beverly Downs,the luxury still of a clear head at noonand the odd exhaustion of having slept too well.

THE VOICE(Baudelaire, La Voix)

When I was a youngstermy cot backed onto a Babel,novels, fables, all the dust since Homer.

I heard two voicesthen; the first, firm, insidious,“The earth is a cake bursting with sweetness,you can have as huge an appetite,pleasure as endless.”

The other “Come, oh, come,no voyage can compare with that in dreams,beyond the possible, the known:”And that voice was the windfrom distant shore to shore,a keening phantom from who knows where.

And I said “Yes.” From then,my wound, my catastrophe.For behind the curtainof immense existences I seestrange, entrancing worlds, and trappedby my vision’s clarity, I walk where snakes snap

at my feet. So like the prophetsI’m drawn to desert and sea,I laugh at others’ griefand cry at feasts;nothing is smoother than bitterest lees,truth and liesare one; and looking at the sky

I stumble, never learning, into holes.But still the Voice consoles,saying “Guard your dreams,none so beautiful can be hadby the wise as by the mad!”

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